Irish women had to satisfy questions about their character and industry in order to receive his funds while still in Ireland, once they were in the United States, Foster’s control over the migrants he assisted was indirect and based on persuasion rather than explicit coercion. Such were the perils of enabling free migration. Foster’s work offers important insights into how gender and race factored into efforts that were designed to convince migrants to voluntarily surrender their independence. Irish servants were instructed to relinquish their liberty of contract in favor of assuming positions as wives and mothers—ideally in homes far removed from New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Empirically, historian Cormac Ó Gráda suggests that midcentury Irish immigrant women, in contrast to their male counterparts, had few reasons to expect that upward mobility would result from secondary, westward migrations. Discounting interpretations that have attributed Irish women’s entrenchment in urban areas solely to their lack of capital, Ó Gráda points out that it may not be “correct to see these Irishwomen as ‘locked in’ to the city and domestic service by poverty.”24 For young women, situations as servants in New York City were virtually guaranteed, even if the quality of available positions varied widely. Unclear as to what relocation and marriage offered them in concrete material terms, many Irish women resisted.
Foster was adamant that the Irish women he sponsored were free to leave the situations he ushered them to—often quite literally as a chaperone accompanying their secondary migrations—and that he would not seek to recover the funds given them.25 But these were largely moot points for women who had already acquiesced to being sent to interior locations, without money or contacts of their own. In bad work situations, young Irish women were vulnerable to immediate exploitation. Their vaunted positions as future wives and mothers offered little in the way of protection against such abuses. As historian Clay Gish has argued, the disjuncture between discourse and material reality was a defining feature of many assisted migration programs created during the midcentury.26 Legally, employers were permitted to dismiss household servants without cause. At best, servants might have a civil claim to their last month’s wages, but only if they worked the majority of that period, had the time and resources to go to court, and found a sympathetic judge. In addition, employers had no legal obligation to provide character references to their servants even though, as the literary historian Bruce Robbins has noted, for nineteenth-century domestics this was akin to a “labor passport.”27 As was the case for all female servants, sexual harassment and rape were consistent dangers as well. Away from eastern cities, Irish immigrant women were far more likely to be isolated from networks of friends and family and commercial establishments such as intelligence offices, which provided resources—namely temporary housing—that allowed servants who left bad work situations to survive without public relief. During the economic crisis of 1857, Foster took a position with the Women’s Protective Emigration Society and turned to unemployed women and widowed and abandoned mothers in New York as new targets for sponsored migrations to domestic labor jobs in the interior. As was so often the case in his work, these women (and their children) were the most economically vulnerable source of potential domestic labor. They were also the most susceptible to being coerced into taking jobs in unknown locations, where risks were highest.
After a fifteen-year hiatus from assisting emigration, Foster returned to this work in 1880. The situation, by then, was quite different. Whereas Foster’s work in the 1850s was marked by his careful personal orchestration of the migration process, he assumed a more detached supervisory capacity in the 1880s that mirrored the corporate and industrial scale that had come to define global migration as whole. In the 1880s, Foster also had to contend with more formidable Irish nationalist resistance to emigration, and what the Irish Land League argued was the forced exile of young Irish women. He also had to navigate new federal policies in the United States that regulated and restricted assisted immigration. In this environment, Foster’s work became divisively politicized. His claims to being a neutral, disinterested broker of migration—spurious to begin with—were no longer tenable.
Surplus Irish Labor, White Settler Capital
Foster’s involvement as a broker of assisted emigration originated in the ideological conflicts over population management that dominated post-famine Ireland. Foster believed that it was imperative for Irish tenants and their families to maximize possible returns on the sole commodity they possessed: their laboring power. Bluntly, he encouraged young men and women in rural Ireland to abandon any hope that there were sufficient natural resources or hiring opportunities—at least for the foreseeable future—that would allow them to remain on their island of birth. Foster characterized assisted emigration as the “most speedy and effectual present means” of aiding Ireland.28 Like many British liberals, he blamed the famine on the failure of the British government to adopt reforms in the decades leading up to 1845. Throughout his career he would support legislation that promoted the sale of encumbered estates to landowners who were intent on introducing better practices. He also backed measures designed to facilitate landlords’ voluntary sale of land as freeholds to successful tenants, which he argued incentivized prudent management.29 On the other hand, Foster drew a hard line against compulsory estate sales. When the Land War racked Ireland during the 1880s, this was a position that squarely aligned him with members of the Anglo-Irish gentry who argued that private property—even though the land in question was obtained in the seventeenth century through colonization and conquest—was sacrosanct.
As a member of the local gentry, Foster was obsessed with his standing among the Irish Catholic tenant farmers who lived on his family’s estate and on nearby lands. To this end, he worked to soothe the many anxieties that these communities had about inserting young women into the global market economy of the mid-nineteenth century. Emigration disrupted the protected status of gendered dependents. Racial and linguistic affinities that connected English-speaking migrants to each other at a familial level, Foster argued, could help offset the impact of these dislocations. Anglophone settler societies, regardless of their specific sovereign status, offered a field of opportunity for white migrants from all classes and were therefore essential spaces for perpetuating a form of democratic capitalism that might allay the internecine class and ethnic conflict that threatened social relations between whites in Ireland, Britain, and the cities of the Atlantic Seaboard.30 In this respect, Foster’s work is emblematic of the complex relationship that Ireland and the Irish people had to the British Empire.31 Foster believed that the nineteenth-century “Settler Revolution,” to use the historian James Belich’s term for the explosive movement of capital, population, and cultural institutions from the British Isles and Ireland to settlements in lands seized by white, English-speaking populations, could be instrumentalized as a policy that included Irish men and women.32
Along with critiquing British state policies concerning assisted family emigration, Foster also lobbied government officials to be more proactive when it came to protecting emigrants’ rights as transatlantic passengers. He pressured British parliamentary officials to protect Irish emigrants as full-fledged members of the Union with rights that transatlantic passenger ship companies were legally compelled to acknowledge. In 1850, for instance, Foster lobbied the British Colonial Land and Emigration Office to better enforce parliamentary measures that required captains to distribute a set amount of rations to passengers.33 This was borne out of his personal experience as a passenger on the Liverpool-based sailing ship Washington. Foster observed that the already perilous five-week voyage was made even more brutal by the fact that the captain withheld the allotted provisions and medical services that he was legally mandated to provide. The Washington’s crew treated Irish steerage passengers with disdain and amused themselves by “drenching them from head to foot” when they used the vessel’s water closets.34 Upon the ship’s arrival in New York, its passengers were discharged without supervision and left to navigate the “various fleecing houses, to be partially or entirely disabled for pursuing their travels into the interior in search of employment.”35 Foster’s anger at the inhumane treatment that the ship’s Irish passengers received was sincere, but he was also aware that Americans were more likely to embrace immigrants if the British imperial government affirmed their right to humane treatment. Technological change would end up having the biggest impact in ensuring Irish immigrants’ healthy arrival. By the end of the 1850s, steamships had all but replaced sail-powered vessels,
